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The Writer's Almanac from Monday, July 22, 2013
The Writer's Almanac from Monday, July 22, 2013"Another Beer" by William Matthews, from Search Party. © Houghton Mifflin, 2004. ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013 It's the birthday of American author and columnist Amy Vanderbilt, born in New York City in 1908, cousin of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railway magnate. She began in journalism at the age of 16 by writing society and feature articles for the Staten Island Advance. In 1952, she wrote the 700-page Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette. It sold millions of copies and established her as the foremost authority on the subject. It is the birthday of the Moravian natural scientist and meteorologist Johann Gregor Mendel, born in Czechoslovakia in 1822. From 1856 to 1863, he performed experiments on 28,000 edible pea plants. From his observations, he developed his theory of inheritance, including the notion of recombination of genes, which became the basis of the modern science of genetics. It's the birthday of the painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing. After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. He tried to re-create it in his paintings. He came back to New York and was employed as an illustrator at an ad agency, which he loathed. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons. Hopper had only sold one painting by the time he was 40 years old, but his first major exhibition — in 1933 at the Museum of Modern Art — made him famous. His pieces in that show had titles like "Houses by the Railroad," "Manhattan Bridge Loop," "Room in Brooklyn," "Roofs of Washington Square," "Cold Storage Plant;" "Lonely House," and "Girl on Bridge." Though his work was more realistic and less experimental than most other painters at the time, he painted his scenes in a way that made them seem especially lonely and eerie. Edward Hopper said, "Maybe I am slightly inhuman ... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® If you are a paid subscriber to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, thank you! Your financial support is used to maintain these newsletters, websites, and archive. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and would like to become one, support can be made through our garrisonkeillor.com store, by check to Prairie Home Productions, P.O. Box 2090, Minneapolis, MN 55402, or by clicking the SUBSCRIBE button. This financial support is not tax deductible.
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